Tuesday, March 1, 2016

Were the nation not transfixed by
the Republican mud wrestling match, we would all have been poring over the New
York Times report about Hillary Clinton’s handling of Libya policy. Links here and here.

In a long, detailed and extensively reported story the Times
presents Hillary Clinton as well-informed and engaged, but more interested in posturing than in leading. Her well-meaning efforts have produced to a debacle of monumental proportions. It quotes Colin Powell's dictum: You break it; you own it. In the case of Libya the Times makes clear that Hillary owns it.

The Times remains reasonably objective about Clinton. It
allows the resulting events to speak for themselves. And the inescapable judgment is that
Hillary Clinton, however many briefing books she read, however many good questions
she asked, was in it for the bravado. She was showboating and grandstanding…
trying to burnish her credentials as a macho warrior. When it came to the
potential consequences, she had nary a clue.

With the Times being fair and balanced in its presentation
of Hillary Clinton, the facts, not rhetorical
flourishes, tell the story.

It tells us everything we need to know about the leadership
skills of Hillary Clinton. It tells us that she liked to pretend that she was
in charge, that she liked to pretend that she knew what she was doing but that she did not have a clue.

The Times reports:

This is
the story of how a woman whose Senate vote for the Iraq war may have doomed her
first presidential campaign nonetheless doubled down and pushed for military
action in another Muslim country. As she once again seeks the White House,
campaigning in part on her experience as the nation’s chief diplomat, an
examination of the intervention she championed shows her at what was arguably
her moment of greatest influence as secretary of state. It is a working
portrait rich with evidence of what kind of president she might be, and
especially of her expansive approach to the signal foreign-policy conundrum of
today: whether, when and how the United States should wield its military power
in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Hillary did not know it, but she had been sold a bill of
goods by the men who thought they were going to lead the new Libya. Perhaps they believed
what they were telling her. The facts were otherwise. She may have read all of
the briefing books, but she did not know enough to make an independent judgment.
It’s what happens when you send someone who lacks relevant experience to deal
with a complex situation that eludes her grasp:

Only
after Colonel Qaddafi fell and what
one American diplomat called “the endorphins of revolution” faded did it become
clear that Libya’s new leaders were unequal to the task of unifying the
country, and that the elections Mrs. Clinton and
President Obama pointed to as proof of success only deepened Libya’s divisions.

Now
Libya, with a population smaller than that of Tennessee, poses an outsize
security threat to the region and beyond, calling into question whether the
intervention prevented a humanitarian catastrophe or merely helped create one of
a different kind.

Thanks to Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice—aka
the weird sisters—the Obama foreign policy has adopted the principle that it
should always intervene whenever and wherever
necessary to stop genocide. It is, dare we say, a noble principle. And yet
noble humanitarian principles, as we learned from Angela Merkel, do not
necessarily lead to happy endings.

In Libya, Hillary Clinton saw Qaddafi’s troops advancing on
Benghazi. She believed that once they arrived they would start slaughtering
civilians. The French government had been convinced by a philosopher that it
could not stand by. It was preparing to act. Clinton persuaded Obama to join
the effort, in what was called “leading from behind.” Unfortunately, as the
Times points out, her efforts merely produced a different kind of “humanitarian
catastrophe.”

To assess the consequences, one does well, as the Times
says, to follow the weapons:

The
looting of Colonel Qaddafi’s vast weapons arsenals during the intervention has fed the Syrian civil war,
empowered terrorist and criminal groups from Nigeria to Sinai, and destabilized
Mali, where Islamist militants stormed a Radisson hotel in
November and killed 20 people.

The failed Libya policy also contributed to the refugee
crisis in Europe:

A
growing trade in humans has sent a quarter-million refugees north across the
Mediterranean, with hundreds drowning en route. A civil war in Libya has left
the country with two rival governments, cities in ruins and more than 4,000
dead.

And, Libya has proved to be fertile ground for the Islamic
State to expand its reach:

But Hillary seemed more to be interested in Hillary. She felt
a need to show herself to be a conquering hero, a macho man, a commanding
general. She was less interested in managing the situation on the ground.

The Times describes her as supremely arrogant, too full of
herself to assess the situation and to manage it effectively. She was more
interested in photo-ops than in implementing a policy:

But
Hillary Clinton seemed impatient for a conclusion to the multinational military
intervention she had done so much to organize, and in a rare unguarded moment,
she dropped her reserve.

“We
came, we saw, he died!” she exclaimed.

Two
days before, Mrs. Clinton had taken a triumphal tour of the Libyan capital,
Tripoli, and for weeks top aides had been circulating a “ticktock” that
described her starring role in the events that had led to this moment. The
timeline, her top policy aide, Jake Sullivan, wrote, demonstrated Mrs.
Clinton’s “leadership/ownership/stewardship of this country’s Libya policy from
start to finish.” The memo’s
language put her at the center of everything: “HRC announces … HRC directs
… HRC travels … HRC engages,” it read.

Of course, she ignored the signs of pending doom:

But
there were plenty of signs that the triumph would be short-lived, that the
vacuum left by Colonel Qaddafi’s death invited violence and division.

In
short, the well-intentioned men who now nominally ran Libya were relying on
“luck, tribal discipline and the ‘gentle character’ of the Libyan people” for a
peaceful future. “We will continue to push on this,” he wrote.

Where was Hillary? According to the Times, she had become a
bystander at events that she had helped unleash and had no idea how to
deal with:

And
Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos,
leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee
crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven
that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.

The Times has done some an excellent investigation here. It
shows an amateurish Hillary Clinton pretending to be in charge and not having
any idea of what she was doing. One word that does not pop into mind is:
presidential.

I agree. Though what explains the lack emanating from Hillary, Merkel and most female leaders in Europe? One can point to a number of female politicians in this country, mostly republican, who seem to have the wherewithal to lead. Just as one should not vote for someone because of their sexual organs one should not condemn them for that as well.The answer to the above question one would need to think that maybe feminism is more a determinate than gender. Not many of those women you cited would have thought of themselves in the term "feminist" as it is understood today. In fact some are now for challenging feminism and most actually like men.To blame women for every bad thing that happens is as bad as feminists blaming men for every bad thing that happens. We have two sexes because we were meant to be together and possess the strengths that no one gender can possibly possess. Until we understand we are a team we are destined to be miserable. One only has to look at the unhappiness exhibited by most feminist oriented women. That shows itself in the dislike for women shown by some as well. We each have so much to offer to each other if we take the time to appreciate the strengths and weaknesses we all have in large measure.

Yes, it's "girl power", but only because female chauvinists do not recognize that men and women are equal but complementary. If anything, with the resumption of abortion rites and cannibalistic trials, female chauvinism has demonstrated itself capable of justifying the commission of unprecedented evil with a progressive scale and scope.

That said, both Obama and Clinton own the humanitarian crises not limited to the Middle East, North Africa, and Eurasia.